Theos-Talk Archives (November 2006 Message tt01177)

Gregory,

Thanks for supplying the material that you
did at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/theos-talk/message/37921

I want to give below the following taken
from Dr. Algeo's PREFACE to THE LETTERS OF H.P.
BLAVATSKY, Volume I.

In a later posting, I will pose some questions
which have never been answered and clarified 
in my mind.

>From the PREFACE:

============================================

...Boris de Zirkoff . . . gathered all letters
[of Blavatsky's] of whose existence he knew and
tentatively dated them. . . .

. . . de Zirkoff left ... [this manuscript of
HPB's letters]. . . . to the Theosophical
Society in America. . . .

[Later] . . . the Theosophical Publishing
House [Wheaton] asked [John] Cooper to become
the editor of all the letters and passed on
to him COPIES of all the letters that de
Zirkoff had collected.... [caps added]

John [Cooper]... located a number of additional
letters unknown to Boris de Zirkoff because
of their obscurity or because they had come
to light only after Boris's death. . .

After John Cooper's death, it became clear that,
for several reasons, his work on the letters
could not be used directly. One of those reasons
was the discovery that the texts of many of the
letters - both those de Zirkoff had collected but
not fully edited and those Cooper had added to
the known corpus - were not accurate. . . .

John Algeo as ... [the] new editor . . . [decided
that] all of the texts had to be regathered to assure
their accuracy and fidelity to the best original
sources. That task was performed personally by
John and Adele Algeo for most of the letters. . . .

==========================================

Daniel